Demo(n) Tracks

Huume; 2004

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"There are a million Kandinskys in the Mona Lisa, but no Mona Lisa in a single Kandinsky."

I forget who's responsible for this half-baked jingle, but the gist of it haunts me whenever I listen to such decidedly difficult albums as Vladislav Delay's Demo(n) Tracks, which the presently loved Finlander just released on his own label, Huume. Over the years, Delay has approached his work with a remarkable range of motives and nom de plumes-- from hazy deconstructive/reconstructive clicks-and-cuts dub as Vladislav Delay; to the absurdly slick but full-faced house as Luomo; to an almost perfect synthesis of these two extremes as Uusitalo and the basically channeled Sistol.

Even in his least intelligible moments of experimentation, when the strict lines separating sound, rhythm and overall structure are blurred or disregarded, Delay generally manages the impression that there is at least some method to his madness, or some point to his conceit. There's an unspoken promise that, on any of his albums, Delay firstly has censored himself to a great extent, and secondly has carefully crafted all sounds, however random or disjointed they seem, to create one unified artistic statement in the end. And historically speaking, Delay consistently delivers in this respect, a simple fact that not only commands him high praise, but also an audience willing to work through his most demanding compositions.

Particularly aimless albums like Entain or the Helsinki EP have always been (for me, at least) Delay's most difficult listens. From what I can gather, Delay intended some form-is-content/content-is-form aesthetic for these records that eschewed typical rhythmic and musical figures, and also the static textures and innocuous collages of sound that are ambient music. Initially, the purple haze and sharp bolts of silver noise that fill out Demo(n) Tracks will draw a few comparisons to Entain, but this is a far more abstruse release-- and in little time, frustratingly unrewarding.

Unfortunately, there is no apparent internal logic at work within Demo(n) Tracks' 13 songs, and no discernible reason why the tracks are even split up as they are. There's no movement in ideas, no compelling expansions or collapses of sound, no set-ups or punchlines or Parthian shots. Some recourse to structure is a natural inclination even when improvising freely, but Delay seems to go out of his way to frustrate any remote chance of his passages being obedient to even their own scheme. Which may be the "joke" of Delay's album: At every turn, Demo(n) Tracks refuses even the slightest of human nature, in favor of a perfectly unstructured sound. "You see, you were expecting the album to go somewhere-- but it never does! Hee-haw, avant-garde."

Apparently, Demo(n) Tracks may have been recorded while Delay was hunting ghosts in Berlin, but at most, he seems to have schlepped all the discarded sounds from his more successful projects ("Demonit" is a Luomo goldmine) into a randomized play script, and hit the record button for an hour. The only time Delay seems to have something positive to do with Demo(n) Tracks is on the last track, "Kainuu": 50 minutes of lightning bolts finally amount to some sort of pulse, and Delay defers to beat and actual musical motion, even giving nylon-stringed alms to a temporary chord progression. There's not much expansion from this idea, but the relative excitement it provides this terribly languid album is appreciated.